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Compare / Contrast

Have a look at these two articles, and see if you can spot the difference:

Man loses testicle after strange young woman on street kicks him

Canwest News Service
Published: Thursday, October 29, 2009

Police in Langley, B.C., are investigating after a woman kicked a man in the groin so hard he lost a testicle — the latest in a series of similar assaults. “I just want to know what her problem is,” victim Anthony Clark, 22, said this week. Mr. Clark was walking in Langley in early September when he passed his assailant on the sidewalk. “I was looking down and then I took a passing glance and saw her walk up to me,” he said. That is when the young woman inexplicably kicked him in the groin hard enough to send one of his testicles into his abdomen. Mr. Clark said he was not aware of the severity of his injury until later that night when he “noticed something was missing.” The force of the assault caused his testicle to rupture. It had to be removed and will be replaced by a prosthetic before Christmas. Constables have told him there have been three or four similar assaults on other men, Mr. Clark said.

And this:

10-Year-Old Boys Arrested Over Alleged Rape in U.K.

SkyNews (Emma Rowley, Sky News Online)
Thursday, October 29, 2009

Two 10-year-old boys in the U.K. have been arrested over a claim of rape, according to Sky News.

The alleged victim is an 8-year-old girl who was out playing with the boys on Tuesday.

She went with them to a park where she says she was sexually assaulted, Sky News reported.

The allegation was reported to police on the same day and is being investigated by police.

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5 thoughts on “Compare / Contrast”

THE difference?
The male victim gets a voice. The female victim does not (although, as a child, this complicates things).
The female attacker is openly criticized. The male attackers are described neutrally.
This may be because the testicle-kicking is presented as definite, while the rape is presented as “alleged.” (At least they call it rape, and not sex, as so many news outlet do.)
And for a final weird twist: the female victim was allegedly “sexually assaulted.” The male victim is not said to be “sexually assaulted,” even though he was.

And honestly, I tried to find an example that was both approximately the length of the first article AND an adult female victim, but the length won out.

The female attacker is openly criticized. The male attackers are described neutrally.

You know, I hadn’t noticed that. I had really hung up on the “victim”/”alleged victim” dichotomy, and missed that particular detail.

And it’s true — what that man experienced *was* sexual assault, and, while he’s not getting the treatment women/girls get when they report sexual assault (are you sure you weren’t asking for it, etc.), he also didn’t get the recognition that it WAS sexual assault. All because, of course, men are the aggressors, and therefore can’t be sexually assaulted (unless they’re in prison and/or attacked by another man). Women, as you know, can’t sexually assault people either.

I wonder when that particular myth is going to finally give up and die. It does such a disservice to anyone and everyone who is raped / sexually assaulted / molested / etc.

I’m still hung up on that. I’m still trying to figure out why that would be. I mean, in the man’s case there is physical evidence of assault that would not be there if he had not been assaulted. There isn’t mention of that in the second article, but that article leaves out a lot of information and besides, there have been numerous cases of injury from rape in which the rape was still put in quotation marks. So that’s not it.
Then I thought, well, no one would be asked to be kicked in the nuts. No one asks to be raped either – that’s the definition of rape – but in many rape cases, the “alleged”ness is a question of whether the act (and the accompanying injuries, recently deemed “rough play” in some asshole court or another) were actually asked for in some nonspecific way by the victim. That’s fucked up… but the victim in the quoted story is a child, so that’s even more fucked up. Children can’t ask for rape. So why is it “alleged” here?

Then I realized it was just no damn good to pinpoint a single reason for any of this, since there is not one. Just an insidious culture that encourages simultaneous contradictory beliefs – including the plight of the innocent man, attacked by some crazy bitch (the article implies), who is nonetheless not a victim of sexual assault. (Just a victim of crazy bitchitude, perhaps? All men are, it must be okay!)

Sure they would, my sub asks for that all the time. Maybe the guy was a masochist and he asked for it. Why didn’t he report it until later that night when he realized “something was missing”? Maybe it was just a case of rough sex, and the alleged victim only wanted to cry assault later on when he realized something had gone wrong and he regretted it. That’s how a woman would be treated if she reported something like that, but you won’t see that said about a man.